Overview

Old Filth by Jane Gardam

Book One in Jane Gardam's Old Filth Trilogy

Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away.

Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep that retraces much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history. Feathers' childhood in Malaya during the British Empire's heyday, his schooling in pre-war England, his professional success in Southeast Asia and his return to England toward the end of the millennium, are vantage points from which the reader can observe the march forward of an eventful era and the steady progress of that man, Sir Edward Feathers, Old Filth himself, who embodies the century's fate.

Product Details

About the Author

Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year. She is winner of the David Higham Prize, the Royal Society for Literature's Winifred Holtby Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and the Silver Pen Award from PEN. Her novels include: God on the Rocks, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Old Filth, a finalist for the Orange Prize; The Man in the Wooden Hat, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book prize, and Last Friends, finalist for the Folio Award. She lives in the south of England, near the sea.

Editorial Reviews

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2005 ORANGE PRIZE

Praise for Old Filth

"Excellent and compulsively readable...Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters."—The New York Times Book Review

"[Gardam] is a brilliant writer. Her prose sparkles with wit, compassion and humor."—The Washington Post

"[Gardam] is the best kind of literary escape: serious, mesmerizing, and deeply satisfying."—Los Angeles Review of Books

"It's hard...not to be charmed by a writer with Gardam's substantial gifts."—The New York Times Book Review

"Gardam's prose is so economical that no moment she describes is either gratuitous or wasted."—The New Yorker

"Gardam is a unique and wonderful writer."—The Huffington Post

From the Publisher

This mordantly funny novel examines the life of Sir Edward Feathers, a desiccated barrister known to colleagues and friends as Old Filth (the nickname stands for “Failed in London Try Hong Kong”). After a lucrative career in Asia, Filth settles into retirement in Dorset. With anatomical precision, Gardam reveals that, contrary to appearances, Sir Edward’s life is seething with incident: a “raj orphan,” whose mother died when he was born and whose father took no notice of him, he was shipped from Malaysia to Wales (cheaper than England) and entrusted to a foster mother who was cruel to him. What happened in the years before he settled into school, and was casually adopted by his best friend’s kindly English country family, haunts, corrodes, and quickens Filth’s heart; Gardam’s prose is so economical that no moment she describes is either gratuitous or wasted.

The New Yorker

… [Old Filth] will bring immense pleasure to readers who treasure fiction that is intelligent, witty, sophisticated and -- a quality encountered all too rarely in contemporary culture -- adult. The Washington Post

Jonathan Yardley

Gardam’s novel is an anthology of such bittersweet scenes, rendered by a novelist at the very top of her form. She may have taken the name of her hero’s Hong Kong rival, Veneering, from an unattractive social climber in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, but a reading of her new novel seems convincing proof that the name Old Filth also belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters. The New York Times

Paul Gray

British novelist Gardam has twice won the Whitbread and was shortlisted for the Man Booker. This, her 15th novel, was shortlisted in Britain for the Orange Prize; it outlines 20th-century British history through the life of Sir Edward Feathers, a barrister whose acronymic nickname provides the title: "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong." At nearly 80, Feathers, retired in Dorset after many years as a respected Hong Kong judge, is a hollow man with few real friends and a cold, sexless marriage that has just ended with the death of his wife, Betty. For the first time, "Filth" (as even Betty called him) delves into the past that produced him: a "Raj orphan" raised by a series of surrogates while his father worked in Singapore, Filth served briefly in WWII (guarding the Queen) and had a lackluster stint as a London barrister before emigrating. The flashbacks contrast British privilege and the chaos that ensues when the empire (especially Filth's childhood Malaya), starts to crumble. As Filth undertakes chaotic visits to his Welsh foster home and other sites, Gardam's sharp, acerbic style counterpoints Feathers's dryness. Well-rounded secondary figures further highlight his emptiness and that of empire. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Gardam's impressive oeuvre runs to over 25 books for adults and children, including Whitbread Prize winners The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land, but her latest has the freshness and energy of a particularly brilliant first novel. Filth (short for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong") is a retired international lawyer who has recently been widowed. Left to contemplate his long marriage, the moral contradictions of his career, and the passionate hatred he harbors for his next-door neighbor, Filth keeps returning to the trauma of his childhood as a "Raj orphan," one of the countless colonial children sent away from their parents to be educated in a "home" in an England they had never known. The various meanings of "home" and the gap between the public persona and the private person are just two of the complex themes that Gardam treats here with the lightest of touches. Both witty and poignant, this work is more than a character study; through her protagonist, Gardam offers a view of the last days of empire as seen from post-9/11 Britain. Strongly recommended.-Leora Bersohn, Columbia Univ., New York Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The marvelously versatile Gardam (Faith Fox, 2003, etc.) dips into British imperial history for her extraordinary portrait of a Raj orphan. Filth is an acronym (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) and the affectionate nickname for Sir Edward Feathers, whose distinguished career, as an advocate and judge, began in Hong Kong in 1947. His colleagues saw an "untroubled and uneventful life." Boy, were they wrong. For Eddie, son of a servant of Empire, was a Raj orphan whose common lot was to be shipped off to British foster families. Eddie's case was extreme. His mother died after giving birth in Malaya; his whisky-fueled father rejected him; he was housed with a native girl, Ada, who adored him. Eddie's first trauma will be his removal from Ada; the four-year-old is dispatched (in steerage) to a child-hating, sadistic foster mother in Wales, Ma Didds. His time with her will be his second great trauma. The story begins when Filth is an old man, living alone in the English countryside, his beloved wife Betty recently dead, then alternates fluidly between old age and childhood and youth, which had its bright spots. Filth has repressed memories of Ma Didds's regime, which he ended dramatically with the help of her other charges, his cousins Babs and Claire. Yet the horrifying memory tolls like a distant bell, and the climax comes when Filth and Babs relive it, in the presence of a priest. The wheel has come full circle; the old man is as vulnerable as a child; his spiritual journey is complete. Gardam's richly textured novel is packed with memorable sequences: Eddie traveling to Singapore, an evacuee from WW2 Britain, sharing a cabin with a half-Chinese cardsharp; back in Britain, guarding QueenMary from the Germans; much later, in shock after Betty's death, driving wildly across England to visit ancient, half-mad cousin Babs, who has just proposed to a schoolboy. One of the finest achievements of this greatly talented British author.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

One of the best uses of flashback that I can remember. Immensely wise, this bittersweet story is an old man's life. Gradually Gardam reveals the successes and failures of Eddie Feathers, his astonishing luck and balance amid life's rough seas. We come to respect his judgement, appreciate his wit, thank him for his humanity, and love him for forgiving the infidelities of his wife, and for his embrace of his arch nemesis. We miss him at the end. One of the great characters of British literature today.
We first see eighty-year-old Feathers in retirement in Dorset, England after a long career at the bar in Hong Kong. Careful reasoning on illustrious cases over his career earns him a reputation at home and abroad and he is known to all by the sobriquet "Old Filth" (Failed in London, Try Hong Kong), a term usually reserved for a group of people. His mind drifts back over chapters in his life that formed and directed him, and we see him reason, and change. A remarkable performance which should earn Jane Gardam well-deserved respect and a large audience.

momwifeattorneygolfer

More than 1 year ago

if you enjoy british novels...and i wouldn't use the word contemporary to describe them, you might enjoy this one. I happen to love british writing, so i am biased here. anita brookner is my favorite author. this is in the same vein. excellent writing.

Barb52

More than 1 year ago

What's all the excitement about?, I asked myself. I felt as though I were traveling through the very foggy mind of an elderly gentleman who is losing his faculties. There was far too much wondering what the author meant. Perhaps Gardam meant for readers to feel as though they were somewhat lost. For those of us without a background in the specific history of the 'Raj', many references were lost. I just could not get enthusiastic about OLD FILTH.

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More than 1 year ago

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SheilaDeeth

More than 1 year ago

They don&rsquo;t even see him, in a corner of the room, when today&rsquo;s important lawyers remember Old Filth. They remember him with a touch of fond reverence&mdash;Failed In London but surely made it when he Tried Hongkong. They know he&rsquo;s back in England, and his wife died, and there was that thing... maybe.
But there are many &ldquo;things&rdquo; hiding in Jane Gardam&rsquo;s novel, Old Filth: The history of England&rsquo;s children, born in the Empire&rsquo;s farflung corners and sent &ldquo;home&rdquo; because, somehow, foreign illnesses might be more dangerous than growing up without a family; the history of war, its confusion and agony and loss; and the history of law in the promise of foreign shores. Relationships slowly reveal themselves in new lights as different characters take the stage. And behind it all, almost unseen, Old Filth is almost accidentally gathering his fractured selves into one&mdash;invisible, lost, forgotten, then remembered again.
The writing is pleasingly spare, inviting readers to connect the dots, and rewarding them with brilliantly evocative scenes, low-key pathos and humor, and powerful depths of character and relationships. Events shift effortlessly from past to present, from Malaysia to boarding school and university; and every mystery hides its own kind of answer, near or far, waiting for its perfect revelation. The novel is powerfully moving. The protagonist demands an almost reluctant sympathy. And the decline and fall of Empire are beautifully chronicled in the life of a lonely, oddly appealing, irascible old man.
Disclosure: Our book group picked this book and I&rsquo;m so glad they did.

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More than 1 year ago

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More than 1 year ago

Recommended by 2 friends; characters got me hooked so had to read other 2 books to see what happens to everyone.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Yourgalsal

More than 1 year ago

Oh those naught Brits! This book may explain a lot. Excellent tale of Hong Kong and Great Britain Ex Pats starting just before WWII. I'm not giving anything away by saying that "FILTH" stands for "fail in London, try Hong Kong." If you're of a certain age, you'll enjoy this book.
Two other books on the same theme have been written by this author. I've already started the second one.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

This is a book that can be savored or read quickly. It works on many levels and threads neatly back and forth, as one's mind does after a long life, between the decades of a life. It deals with death and impending death, love, lust and repression, cruelty, secrets and opening up, filth and coming clean, loss and loyalty, the old and the young, the mysteries behind masks, the hurts and longings. It's grist for book clubs and sharing or for just a good read.

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More than 1 year ago

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Love-my-NookNJ

More than 1 year ago

I have several friends who are Raj orphans so I found the book fascinating. I am looking forward to reading the follow-up book "The Man in the Wooden Hat"

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